The Peak Oil Leisure Time Connection

Sometimes I find myself making links
between seemingly unrelated bits of information in my brain. This could
be paranoid schizophrenia, or maybe just the way my brain works. Luckily
I don’t hear voices… yet. Here’s my case in point.

As someone who
often criticizes activities that I think are harmful to the planet, let
me be the first to admit that I like orange juice. And not the frozen,
reconstituted kind. The “not from concentrate,” fresh squeezed orange
juice, in those non-recyclable paperboard and wax square containers. So
it’s an environmental double whammy. It’s not bad enough that the juice
has traveled by diesel truck all the way from Florida; I’m filling up
the local dump with the packaging while I’m at it. I expect David Suzuki
to be parked in my driveway ready to hammer me after reading this.

So when Michelle showed me this video I watched it with great interest. It shows where that orange juice comes from.

While
I knew it was bad that the juice had traveled so far, at least those
oranges were all picked by hand, right? NOT! I had no idea they now had a
machine that shakes the orange trees and collects the oranges as they
fall. If you watch this video you get a sense that the Florida orange
juice industry has very few employees any more. All you see is machines,
and trucks, and automated factories handling and juicing and packing
the oranges. It’s horrifying. No wonder the unemployment rate is so
high.

This is all possible because of affordable, and abundant
liquid hydrocarbons like gasoline and diesel fuel. We live in an amazing
time that we have tamed this oil “man-servant” and it does so much of
the grunt work for us.

Then I read a Maclean’s magazine
article that described Dutch women as being the happiest on the planet,
with three quarters of them choosing to work part-time. Maybe the men
are miserable earning a greater percentage of their household income,
but women in Holland seem happy with the deal. Macleans showed a
woman, who rides her bike to fetch groceries, has lots of time with her
kids and husband, takes art classes and spends “leisurely” afternoons
drinking coffee with friends. Woo hoo! Sign me up! Sounds awesome. Now
I’m sure this may not be a perfectly representative example, but I guess
the gist is that sometimes people choose quality of life over income.

It
reminds me of the Michael Moore documentary “Sicko” where he explores
the health care systems of the U.S. and Canada as well as the U.K. and
France. In France it’s not enough that they have universal healthcare
and a mandatory 6 weeks of paid vacation every year. From the
documentary I got the sense that the state looks after you so well that
if you are feeling a little overwhelmed, dealing with a new baby for
example, the government would send someone over to cook your dinner and
wash your clothes. Nice.

As I watched the French lifestyle as
portrayed by the movie “Sicko” I kept thinking to myself “this isn’t
sustainable.” And low and behold, France is one of the countries now
being targeted as having too much government debt from all these
programs. And when the French government tries to cut back on some of
them, like moving the retirement age from 60 to 62, the country is shut
down by strikes and protests because once people have these privileges,
they will not give them up willingly.

It was like Dick Cheney
famously saying “The American way of life isn’t up for negotiation.”
Well Dick, you may be correct. It’s not going to be negotiated away …
it’s going to be drained away from an empty gas tank. Our way of life is
based on cheap and abundant fossil fuels. And The International Energy
Agency (IEA), the people that developed governments use to provide them
with data on where we’re at in terms of energy in the world, say we hit
peak oil in 2006. And they say we should have started preparing for it a
decade ago. The “Hersch Report” by the U.S. Government said that we
should have started downshifting our lives and economies TWO decades
before peak oil hit. So how’s that going? None of our governments will
even admit that Peak Oil exists.

So it looks like we’re all in for
a rude awakening and our lives are going to be changed in major ways.
People in the developed world are going to have to realize that food,
and coffee, has been cheap because of cheap oil. Food is going to get
much more expensive and we’re going to have to devote a lot more of
income to purchasing it. Energy used in transportation and heating and
cooling will also go up in price. Any energy you use will get more
expensive. Which is going to probably mean fewer free afternoons spent
sipping coffee.

And it’s going to mean that I’ll have to be
prepared to drink less orange juice. I know it’s coming. And while it
could be pretty depressing, I take the other point of view and figure
that I’m going to keep dancing while the music is playing. I savor my
orange juice like someone else would savor a bottle of fine wine. It’s
quite precious. In fact it’s a miracle that I can even afford such a
luxury, living in a cold climate a 24-hour truck ride from the warm
moist soils of Florida. So I really do consider myself a lucky man.

This is what I tried to convey in my book “Thriving During Challenging Times.”
The future is going to be different, but it doesn’t have to necessarily
be worse. I know very few people who wouldn’t mind spending less time
in a veal-fattening pen of an office having their life energy sucked out
of them by a computer, and more time in a garden growing vegetables to
nurture their bodies. Because that time with your hands in the soil, and
your face in the sun also nurtures your soul. I just don’t think you
can get the same feeling of peace and contentment reading your monthly
retirement statement (which is probably going down these days) than from
pulling a carrot from your garden, and enjoying its crispy goodness.

So
I shall continue to be grateful to live in a time with the miracle of
air travel, and personal transportation in cars, and fresh orange juice
delivered to the frozen north, and I will cherish the luxuries it
provides. And I’m making mental and physical preparations for the time
when the energy that provides these luxuries is not so abundant. I’ve
got one apple tree laden with apples in the garden this year. I’d better
get some more planted. Looks like it’s going to be apple cider for me
soon.

While I agree with the over-all theme of this article, the author romanticizes the benfits of growing your own carrots in your own graden just a bit and minmizes the hardships of life after oil. When a drought or an late spring frost can mean the difference of surviving or dying during the next winter after a failed crop, the psychological benefits of growing your own carrots won't seem so important. Gardeners today can reap those secondary, quality of life benefits only because oil/cheap energy/cheap food (not to mention imported wine) is available as a back-up. Yes, we need to prepare for the day (sooner than we like to think) when cheap oil is gone, but it ain't gunna be pretty. A modern combine does the work of 80 men. When we're reduced to picking corn again by hand, either the cost of corn will be so high or the wages so low that, either way, nobody will be able to afford to get fat.

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